WENDY MILLER​'S BIOGRAPHY
Wendy Miller Ph.D., LPC-BCPC, ATR-BC, LCPAT, R.E.A.T., is a writer, sculptor, expressive arts therapist, licensed professional counselor, and educator. She is the co-founder of Create Therapy Institute (301 652-7183, ext 3), co-founded in 1994 and now located in Kensington, MD, which offers clinical services in arts-based psychotherapy and training in experiential approaches to learning. Her clinical work with individuals and families across the life-cycle addresses existential and identity issues of aging, psychosocial education, medical illness, adoption, loss, grief, and creativity. Her focus is on the relationships among the arts, creativity, and health.
Dr. Miller has taught throughout the country at the George Washington University, John F Kennedy University, San Francisco State University, California Institute of Integral Studies, Southwestern College, and Lesley College. She is a founding member and first elected (past) executive co-chair of the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association (IEATA), where she continues to be on their Advisory Council. She is also on the Advisory Board of MaineGeneral’s Healthy Living Resource Center and Blossom Arts Board of Advisors.
Dr. Wendy Miller is an integrative thinker. Her skills take her into the worlds of fine art, writing, psychology, expressive arts therapy, and mind-body medicine. She has published on medical illness and the arts as complementary medicine, the use of sand tray therapy with internationally adopted children, experiential approaches to supervision in expressive arts therapy, and the cultural responsibility of the arts in therapy. Her current work continues the legacy of her late husband Dr. Gene Cohen in creative aging. Miller collaborated with Cohen, First Chief of the Center on Aging of the National Institute of Mental Health, and later the Acting Director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Cohen is considered one of the founders of the fields of geriatric psychiatry and creative aging. Miller continues to run his non-profit Washington DC Center on Aging, (www.dcccenteronaging.org) where she is guiding it into projects on intergenerational communication; and his intergenerational game company Genco Games (www.genco-games.com). Cohen invented four intergenerational board games: Word Wars II that was selected by an international art jury for a three-year museum tour; the Essential Cribbage Board, with innovations for older adults, as well as physically and visually impaired; Tic Tac Phone; and Making Memories Together (MMT), the first game to be patented for use with persons who have Alzheimer's disease and related memory disorders. MMT was evaluated on a grant awarded by the National Institute on Aging at NIH, and featured on CBS TV's “Healthwatch."
Dr. Miller continues to research the relationships among the arts, creativity, aging, and health. She has published her book from the writing she and Gene did together, entitled: Sky Above Clouds: Finding our way through creativity, aging and illness, released in March 2016 from Oxford University Press. (www.sky-above-clouds.com). Miller is a speaker available for conference keynotes, conversational readings, and presentations on life-cycle challenges and creative aging.